Jennie Nash

A rare breed, a writer who knows how to tell a story as powerfully on stage as she does on the page, Ms. Nash is seen in hundreds of national magazine articles for publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Real Simple, Self, Shape, Child, Glamour, Mademoiselle, GQ, US, Home, Working Woman, New York Woman, and Readers' Digest. Her specialty, for more than 20 years, has been writing about the small moments that give life meaning. On stage, Jennie brings her personal story to life, skillfully guiding audiences through laughter, tears and the inspiration to find out what adversity can mean in their own lives and in the lives of those they love.

Jennie Has is a rare breed: a writer who knows how to tell a story as powerfully on stage as she does on the page. She is the Chief Creative Office of No Blank Pages, the features editor for Compose Journal, the author of seven books and a private book coach to fiction and non-fiction writers.

Ms. Nash is seen in hundreds of national magazine articles for publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Real Simple, Self, Shape, Child, Glamour, Mademoiselle, GQ, US, Home, Working Woman, New York Woman, and Readers' Digest. Her specialty, for more than 20 years, has been writing about the small moments that give life meaning. For her, one of those moments was a breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 35. It followed on the heels of a friend's fatal struggle and gave her the opportunity to look as closely at illness and death as she had been looking at life. "Everyone always says that a personal crisis, like cancer changes you," Nash says, "and almost from the moment of my diagnosis, I wanted to know exactly how. How does it change you?"

Her answer was her third book, The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming and Other Lessons I Learned From Breast Cancer (Scribner, October 2001; Plume Paperback, October 2002). Far more than a memoir of illness, Nash tells the story of how she became a wise old woman at a tender young age, and shows us how adversity can make us all wise if we only let it. On stage, Ms. Nash brings her story to life, skillfully guiding audiences through laughter, tears and the inspiration to find out what their personal struggles, whether health, career, or family, can mean in their own lives.

The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Coming continues to find a widespread audience. In 2002, Ford Motor Company purchased 110,000 copies of to use as giveaways in their national education outreach campaign, for which Ms. Nash waived her royalties. Ford also toured her to major cities to speak and to sign books during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in 2002, and hired her to write a short work of fiction, entitled My Grandma's Bandana, which was given away to survivors at Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure events in 2003 and 2004.

Ms. Nash's other work includes Raising a Reader: A Mother's Tale of Desperation and Delight and Altared States: Surviving the Engagement. She has taught classes on illness and storytelling at both UCLA and WebMD.com. A graduate of Wellesley College, Ms. Nash lives with her husband and their two girls in Los Angeles, California.

Write Your Way to a More Balanced Life
Can writing about your life diminish stress, reduce anxiety, and help you feel more balanced in a fast-moving world? Experts agree that the answer is YES - and author/writing coach Jennie Nash will show your audience exactly how to do it. She
has guided a wide range of memoir writers, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a gay phone sex operator, an advertising mogul, the mother of an autistic child, a Broadway ballerina, a woman on the hunt for her mother's murderer, and a college admission officer who had a quiet, devastating meltdown. Her own memoir about the lessons of breast cancer has inspired thousands of reader about the healing benefits of creative self expression. She will give your audience insight into how to establish a writing habit; tips on how to overcome self consciousness and doubt; and tools for tapping into the creative voice we all have but which sometimes is speaking in a whisper too low to hear. Researchers estimate that up to 75% of all visits to primary-care physicians are for problems
related to stress, and recent research shows that journaling is an effective stress relief exercise, with both physical and emotional benefits. Give your audience the gift of a creative habit that can change their lives -beginning today.

"Giving shape to a painful experience is powerful because it helps us to see first, how we got through it; second, how we can share it. The experience doesn't stay trapped within us, unspoken, curdling — instead, the art of arranging and transforming it reduces the burden. It no longer belongs to only you. The process of assigning the experience a beginning, a middle and an end, of giving it form, is a way of mastering it. Each sentence contains the chaos — our experience becomes what we perceive. And the honesty in these perceptions, whether true or invented, creates a bridge to another person." - Karen Bender

The Victoria's Secret Catalog Never Stops Comingand Other Lessons We Learn From Breast CancerA keynote presentation designed to inspire breast cancer patients, survivors and caregivers, this upbeat, hilarious and insightful talk is perfectly suited for fundraising luncheons, women's wellness or leadership retreats and survivor events.

Everyone always says that cancer changes you, and it can be tempting to expect those changes to be loud, sudden and accompanied by the call of a trumpet. In this presentation, Jennie Nash demonstrates how, more often than not, the lessons you learn from cancer creep up on you in the midst of ordinary life. They come in the guise of a postman bringing the Victoria's Secret catalog on the day you find out you need a mastectomy or in the surreal parade of survivors who offer to unbutton their shirts to show you the result of their surgery. Nash skillfully captivates her audiences with hilarious tales from the trenches of her own illness, and then charges people to embrace the lessons they've learned from cancer. It's a talk that takes audiences from laughter to tears to a sense of limitless possibility.

A Storyteller's Guide to Happiness
Jennie Nash is a private book coach to writers who want to tell their stories on a large stage. Her clients have snagged top agents and juicy book deals, and landed on The Today Show, the front page of the New York Times review section and the Tedx stage. She knows what it takes to create a narrative that moves people - and it turns out to be the same thing that it takes to create a product people love, launch a business that will thrive, or find a way of being in the world that is authentic and alive: it's speaking in your true voice. Nash, a natural teacher and a gifted storyteller, will show your audiences how to hone in on the one point they most want to make, let go of the narratives that aren't serving them, and have the courage to speak with their whole heart. Using case studies from clients who have written on topics ranging from money addiction to grief, online dating to online education, Nash delivers a powerful and heartfelt presentation that will leave your audience feeling empowered and inspired to tell a better story.